Talking Tails is a gentle, winsome, and engaging amble through the world of pets and people, with many stops and detours along the way. Sisters Ann Love and Jane Drake use anecdotes, narratives, imaginary call-in shows, and annotated illustrations to explore their topic. Bill Slavin’s accompanying images are clear, friendly, and inviting.

Be forewarned, though: cat and dog lovers will likely get more out of the book than those interested in other kinds of pets. Rodents, lizards, birds, and horses are dealt with in a few pages each. Cats and dogs, on the other hand, each merit over 20 pages.

Furthermore, Talking Tails may not be the ideal book for young readers who want hard facts about a specific type of animal. In the section that deals with birds, for example, we are treated to a delightful anecdote about Polly, a foul-mouthed African grey parrot who lived in the Caribou Hotel in Carcross, Yukon. You wouldn’t want to use the story as a reference for a school project, or even to make a decision about whether to buy a parrot yourself, but if you love animals, and love to read about them, that won’t matter.

That’s not to say there is no hard information in Talking Tails. Running along the bottom of each page is a timeline that begins in 100,000 BC and ends in the present, offering a compendium of events related to animal-human interactions, including breeding, domestication, and other topics. And the text itself, especially in the dog and cat sections, does contain useful information. You just have to read it all to find it.

The resulting book has the feel of slow molasses dripping off a spoon: sweet and satisfying, but never in a hurry to get where it’s going.